If I was able to meet a historical figure, I’ve got quite a long list of contenders. Most are craft-related. Let me tell you about a few of them… we’ll go in order of most recent to the oldest.
Cue Song: Let’s do the time warp again!
- Gerald Gardner. Unfortunately, I can’t tell you the questions that I’d ask him. Spoiler alert: they’re oathbound.
- Dion Fortune. I’d love to pick her brain about the Qabalah. (The Mystical Qabalah is a difficult, but very rewarding book to get through)
- Franz Bardon. I’ve got my own personal interpretations for some of the more cryptic parts of Initiation Into Hermetics, but what substitute would those be for hearing it all straight from Bardon himself?
- Heinrich Cornelius Agrippa. What couldn’t I ask this guy? He seems to have written the book on almost everything.
- Jesus Christ. I really only have one question: “How do you feel about what’s happened to your teachings after a couple thousand years?”
At the top of my list, however, certainly sits Pythagoras. Although I don’t have any interest in discussing triangles, exploring and interpreting the concept of the “music of the spheres” has been a recent interest of mine.
Pythagoras believed, essentially, that all celestial bodies produced a particular sound determined by their orbit and distance from the earth. This underlying theory is the basis for several more esoteric discussions… of which I’m sure I’ll write about at some point.
It was rumored Pythagoras felt this so keenly that he could just look at the night sky and hear the “music.” I wish I could go back, throw on a toga, walk up to him and ask…
“So what, exactly, do those spheres sound like to you anyway?”
Good morning and happy Monday, friends!
This past week yet again bears the fruit of more music. Here’s what I’ve accomplished since the last post:
I also recorded a “Mystery Chant” as a short video, and with it, I believe I broke new ground with video editing. I’ve been putting off trying something like this for a long time just because it’s so freaking hard with iMovie and I refuse to invest in any more software until I at least start to break even here.
So let me rant about this for a paragraph or two. Pretty much every video you watch anywhere, whether you realize it or not, contains multiple shot angles. Usually that’s done by recording on several cameras at the same time. For a pro, splicing them together is no problem because they’re using software that is capable of handling many files simultaneously. Alright, well I have one camera (my iPhone) and free software (iMovie) that can only handle two things at the same time.
I’ve been dying to see if I could sync multiple video shots and angles to an audio file and I decided to test it out on a 60 second YouTube short video of “guess that chant.” I arranged a well-known pagan song for fingerstyle guitar, then recorded and mixed the audio separately in Ableton Live. Once that was done, I blasted the audio over speakers while I recorded four different videos of me playing along to it. I was able to use one video as a guide, then overlay the others individually. I transitioned to a new shot roughly every 5 seconds, so that makes 12 scenes in my 60 second clip. I’d like to do longer songs this way, but that will definitely take longer than a day’s worth of effort.
As it turns out, “let me record a video every day” is a really good idea for about one week. It’s starting to get less and less fun now, but I feel as if I have definitely passed the challenge I gave myself. I’m going to keep recording until I have enough original music to fit on an album — somewhere between 10 and 13 songs sounds like a good number, then I’ll release that as “Unplugged Volume 1.” After that, It’s time to take a more balanced approach to my content creation, which means spending a little bit more time writing articles, a book, and also focusing on some bigger-picture music, like tracks that I actually produce to “studio quality” over several weeks.
But all this effort has been noticed, at least by a few. One of my songs has been played on Witchcraft TV and they even put up a short spotlight page about me, which is really cool!
Hey, listen, I don’t usually expressly ask for action, but if you’ve listened to and enjoyed any of my music so far, please consider subscribing on YouTube. Even better if you can thumbs up one of my videos. YouTube is very clearly passing my content through its algorithm and hasn’t quite figured out what to do with it.
Exhibit A:
Right, so apparently “feet girl” is currently a search term leading to my pagan chants. See the confusion? But if you, as a witchy or pagan watcher, click through on my content, like, or subscribe, it’ll help train YouTube’s algorithms.
That’s all for now. I’ve got to get some sleep so I can wake up and do it all again tomorrow!
Cheers!
Aerik Arkadian 
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